Makes sense in lore is a good reason. BUT, there are things like defender missiles in game that no one uses, because they are sort-of-pointless. Adding a passive defense layer to ships (where appropriate) could be an effective replacement that does ad something to the game. Secondary(s) should be weak, but that doesn’t make them pointless.

IF you wanted a module based addition, than battle cruisers ( and bigger) COULD get a dedicated module that fine tunes the passive defenses either for missile interception or anti-drone, neither should have a high success rate, even when maxed out. But I can imagine modules like “HMPT Secondary targeting computer” module or a “HSMV Targeting computer”. High Maneuverability Persistent Target. or High Speed Multi-Vector. One that make the secondary slightly less dismal against drones or missiles.

The change it would make to game play is that it makes fighting big ships more attrition based. Drones will be lost more often to enemy fire. It happens, but it shouldn’t make a super big impact on most battles. Atleast I wouldn’t think so. We all agree it makes sense in Lore though and that’s reason enough for it to be looked into.

This is a dumb idea for the same reasons it’s always been a dumb idea. Don’t pretend you’re the first to propose it. Ship balance is working as intended, and when it’s not, it gets rebalanced. This just adds free tank to every BS. It would push the meta more to BS territory, which is undesirable. Therefore, if they were to get this tank buff, they’d require a simultaneous tank nerf, making this entire proposal pointless. And there are less stupid ways of buffing tank to begin with. To preserve your ego, just pretend that point defense weapons are included as part of shield technology, and move on.

If something like that ever get implemented, it will absolutely need to have drawback that render your ship nearly 100% inefficient in it’s primary intended role so you can’t double dip. You would get something like a battleship murderzoning small ships who at the same time can’t even hope to deal with anything bigger than a destroyer.

Balance trump lore/realism in all case because frankly, reality is a sad game to play.

Lore-wise, secondaries exist, and are mentioned in passing on occassion. Gameplay wise, they don’t. They’re there, we just don’t get to have them as capsuleers. There, happy? Lore based response to a lore based question, alongside the gameplay logic as well.

The secondary weapons you’re referring to are mounted on the smaller ships that are escorting you. IF you wanna keep your RP going, add a few RLML Caracals (navy hull if you really want…) and you’ll have zero problems melting smaller targets.

They designed a heavy hitter, with the intent of hitting big things.

A military weapon is never designed to cover everything, because then it cannot cover anything with any measure of effectivenss. They’re designed to specialize, so that they can support each other.

Yes, Yes, I realize. But you’re under selling the value of theatrics. This game is basically a spread sheet editor with space ship graphic, Theatrics is kind of important since it’s 80% of what separates EVE from Excel. CCP does in fact put some time and resources into making things shiny and theatrical. I am not suggesting EVE needs to be realistic. Clearly it is not that kind of a game, How ever what it does need is to be internally consistent. This is a Universe with space militaries and there fore, military planners, designers, etc. A ship designer would find the resources ( in world) worth the time to add secondary(s) because the resources are minimal but the potential outweighs it.

Every game is “basically an X with a Y”, that’s not a reason for basically anything ever.

We can sit here and invent lore reasons all day for why the universes is setup like it is. Maybe ships just don’t have the power, maybe they don’t have the space, maybe they don’t have the supporting systems, and maybe it’s a combination of these.

It’s a game, if you’re not willing to suspend your disbelief and invest yourself in the game’s universe then you’re going to have a pretty much never ending list of these “consistency errors” in pretty much any game.

Jevinie:

Why does no one back up their claims

“Power creep”

“Unbalanced”

etc.etc.

But no one felt the need to back up how it would over throw the tenuous balance of the universe.

I suspect this is because you don’t know how; but you are offended anyone would want to change something about the perfect game which should obviously stay exactly the way it is, forever and ever.

This is because if you actually understand how Eve is balanced and how the balance between small and large ships in Eve works you’d realize instantly, with zero explanation, why adding effective ‘secondaries’ to a Battleship in Eve would be so blindly and obviously over powered.

The short answer here is that large ships have more of basically everything than smaller ships. More HP, more range, more damage, more slots for utility and tank, more fitting space to fill those slots, ect. The only thing larger ships don’t have is speed, but that’s not worth much in Eve except for running away if you can’t get in and get under a larger ship’s guns in some way.

Adding secondary weapons that are effective against small ships destroys this and therefore destroys the balance between ship classes.

Yes, Yes, I realize. But you’re under selling the value of theatrics. This game is basically a spread sheet editor with space ship graphic, Theatrics is kind of important since it’s 80% of what separates EVE from Excel. CCP does in fact put some time and resources into making things shiny and theatrical. I am not suggesting EVE needs to be realistic. Clearly it is not that kind of a game, How ever what it does need is to be internally consistent. This is a Universe with space militaries and there fore, military planners, designers, etc. A ship designer would find the resources ( in world) worth the time to add secondary(s) because the resources are minimal but the potential outweighs it.

and the game has that. militarily a large explosive pulse that hits everything in around your ship with no gaps and uses no ammo is preferred over smaller PDF weapons to do the job

I’d argue that ‘large’ isn’t really accurate to describe the range of smartbombs, they only really become slightly useful in the officer variants.

However, you are otherwise spot on. Secondary weapon systems exist. If the OP feels the need to equip his ship with them, he can fit any size guns/missiles to his hardpoints, and on most big ships he can put light drones in the drone bay.

Failing that, you bring Destroyer escorts, or Cruiser/Battlecruiser escorts outfitted with Rapid Light launchers and drones. Or a Rattlesnake with it’s monstrous native tank and ability to fit fully bonused light weapons for crushing the soul out of tackle.

I’d argue that ‘large’ isn’t really accurate to describe the range of smartbombs, they only really become slightly useful in the officer variants.

This isn’t really true unless you limit your use-case entirely to solo and define useful as “useful against Frigates”. Most smartbombs are quite useful against drones and in groups it’s pretty hard to stay within short to medium weapons range of a target and not hit at least one player’s smartbomb. Of course the tradeoff there is the player is probably hitting their allies, but that’s just a tradeoff of the weapon.

idk if that’s talking about how i said the game is old but I noticed I forgot to elaborate on how the ways i said the game would change would be changing it to it’s core. Which has been around for a long time, and the devs are just gonna say “nope, not doing this” because if it ain’t broke you don’t fix it.